Let's take a look at DVD releases for this week, shall we?

Annie Wagner did not like Elegy, an adaptation of Phillip Roth's The Dying Animal, very much at all.

I don't mind adaptations varying from their source materials, but when there's no identifiable rationale for certain pointed alterations, you end up assigning all sorts of motivations to the adapter. For instance: Was screenwriter Nicholas Meyer (The Human Stain) so freaked out by the notion of an older man licking the menstrual blood off his former student's inner thigh that he purposely chose to confine himself to the single coy anecdote she recounts about a high-school boyfriend asking to watch her bleed?

I was confused and mystified by Punisher War Zone:

At times, the dialogue is so bad it's funny ("Don't die on me!" the Punisher barks at a guy with an axe in his chest, and when the guy coughs up some blood to protest, Punisher snaps at him, "Shut up, kid, you're gonna be fine!"), but more often it's just pathetic (Hutchison tries to make "Yummy yummy yummy in my tummy tummy tummy" sound menacing. He fails.)

And the commenters on that particular review hated that I called the Punisher a flimsy concept. Likewise, some people got very upset that I was not a fourteen-year-old girl when I reviewed Twilight, which has a special Saturday release date:

Because most of the film consists of endless stretches of dialogue, Catherine Hardwicke moves the camera around her actors ceaselessly in order to do something. At two points the expository chatter gets so dull that the camera just starts panning around to different elements of scenery—look! A mossy tree!—rather than stick with the monotony of two actors yapping.

Also out this week are the weirdly computer animated movie Azur and Asmar, which I was kind of into but found a little slow, the Masterpiece Theater adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and a whole bunch of TV series, including season 8 of JAG (I'm kind of creeped out by the notion that somewhere this morning, some guy was camping outside of a mall just waiting to buy JAG season 8), season 10 of Married...With Children, and the first two seasons of Mister Belvedere. Mister Belvedere practically raised me, so this is of course a big event for me, and I was pleased to pull out the theme song instead of the Twilight trailer. You're welcome.